Sir John Mennes (Comptroller of the Navy)

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(1599-71). Comptroller of the Navy 1660-71. He entered the navy as a youth....During 1635-9 he was continuously at sea, attaining the rank of Vice-Admiral, and later (1642) Rear-Admiral. He served in the army in the Scottish war and commanded a troop of horse for the king in the Civil War.....and during the '50s acted as a royalist agent abroad. At the Restoration he was commissioned to the "Henry" in 1660, becoming Commander-in-chief in the Downs and Narrow Seas 1661-2. He had by this time won a reputation as a man of action, a witty conversationalist, a learned chemist who dabbled in medicine and a writer of amusing, if usually coarse, verse. But in Nov. 1661 he was made Comptroller and moved into a world of government finance and book-keeping in which he was a stranger and ill at ease.

From L&M Companion. Just part of the entry, more information for later in the diary.

Could anyone explain This could be researched within the diary. I seem to remember that the Davis's lived in that adjoining house. Perhaps when they left for Ireland, Sam took up a chamber that was doored to be part of either unit. He has been looking for history that says that his unit originally "owned" this chamber. Mennes comes in and wants the chamber and cites recent history of which unit it belongs to. Or thinks he has vague grounds to claim it, but Sam gives him firmer ground by remodeling in a way that cuts the light from Mennes's unit.

Sorry, I don't have time to search and figure all this out, but I seem to remember that we have had a fair number of clues in the diary to date that might sort this out. There has been evidence of rooms with doors that allow them to be part of either of two adjoining units.

L&M's claim that by the Restoration Mennes had "won a reputation as....a writer of amusing, if usually coarse, verse" was not universally shared. His Cavalier poetry published in the Interregnum was burlesque, no coarser than the satire of Ben Jonson's "On the Famous Voyage" (Epigrammes, c. 1612), which uses the popular scatological imagery of the London waterworks to tell the tale of two Londoners who hire an open boat to row them up the sewage-clogged Fleet Ditch. http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220...

The most recent appreciation of Mennes's literary life and work is *Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy* (Hardcover) by Timothy Raylor University of Delaware Press (September 1994) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0874135230/sr=...

Abstracting from a review of it: In the [1620s and 1630s] Mennes was the main catalytic figure of a kind of fraternity or a literary drinking club,"The Order of the Fancy," that exemplified a "a commitment to traditional concepts of order and an espousal of classicism, good-fellowship, and wit," using burlesque and satire as subversive tools to advance the Stuart cause.

"A 'drollery' during the Interregnum came to mean 'an anthology built around the verse of Mennes, Smith, and their circle' (114). Several of the more famous titles are Musarum Deliciae (1655), Wit and Drollery (1656), and Wit Restor'd (1658)....[W]hile they were not exactly the parents of the octosyllabic doggerel style, they were perhaps its midwives: they gave it its distinctive tone, and they popularized it" (215). Some of the writers Raylor identifies as having inherited this legacy were Samuel Butler, George Etherege, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift."

Has the bibliophile, songster Pepys not come across Mennes/Smith publications at Playford's?

The Order of the Fancy ballad "'The Blacksmith'" to be sung to a version of "Greensleeves," "proved enormously popular, and — variously entitled "The Blacksmith" or "Which Nobody Can Deny" — all but supplanted the older version of "Greensleeves" through the latter part of the seventeenth-century....The version of the tune....[was] printed in John Playford's Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion (1686). http://ett.arts.uwo.ca/rump/site/r151_180/r162/...----Musarum Deliciae (1655), Conteining severall select Pieces of Poetique Wit.[but NOT "He that fights and runs away, &c"] By Sr J. M[ennes] and Ja[mes] S[mith] The Second Edition, LONDON Printed by J.G.for Henry Herringman, and are to be sold at his Shop, at the Signe of the Anchor in the New Exchange, 1656. [online text] http://www.immortalia.com/html/books-and-manusc...----550. Wit and drollery joviall poems / corrected and much amended, with new additions, by Sir J.M[ennes]. ... Sir W.D. ... and the most refined wits of the age. is available in digital form via institutional subscribers to Early English Books Onlinehttp://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/New_Text/New_...----WIT RESTOR'D In feverall Select POEMS Not formerly publifli'tLONDON, Printed for R. Pollard, N. Brooks, and T. Dring, and are to be sold at the Old Exchange, and in Fleetstreet. 1658. [online text] http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924012980664/... WIT RESTOR'D http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1600s/1...

The L&M Companion entry concludes: "His wife died in July 1662, without leaving children, and does not appear in the diary. Pepys mentions his sister, Mary Hamond and her daughters. One of her daughters, Elizabeth, was Mennes's executrix and inherited most of his personal property."The only archive appears to be personal http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches...

If you are interested in the family you could try the references in either DNB or ODNB; Cokayne, Doyle or the older editions of Burke's Baronetage .. , Gentry etc. might provide some leads.

John Minnes (Mennes or Mennis), son of Andrew Minnes of Sandwich, born in that town March 1st, 1598, and educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, became afterwards a great traveller and noted seaman. He was knighted by Charles I. at Dover in 1641, and in 1642 he was captain of the "Rainbow." When the Earl of Warwick was nominated by the Parliament Lord High Admiral he refused to act under him. After the Restoration he was appointed Governor of Dover Castle, and his warrant from the Duke of York to act as Vice-Admiral and Commander-in-Chief in the Narrow Seas was dated May 18th, 1661. He was Comptroller of the Navy from 1661 till his death in 1671. He is buried in the Church of St. Olave, Hart Street, where, in the south aisle, part of a monument to his memory is still to be seen. Wood describes him as an honest and stout man, generous and religious, well skilled in physic and chemistry. He was part-author of "Musarum Deliciae." ---Wheatley, 1899.

MENNIS, or MINNS, Sir John, - was appointed commander of the Henry in 1661, and at the same time received a commission to act as vice-admiral and commander-in-chief of his majesty's fleet in the Narrow Seas, with permission to wear his flag at the main-top, in the absence of his royal highness the duke of York and the earl of Sandwich. It may be thought not a little singular, that no mention is ever made of this gentleman as employed in active service, when we have positive evidence of his having held so distinguished a rank in it. The fact is, he quitted that line of employment soon after the restoration for the comptrollership of the navy, in which office he died early in the year 1671. --- Biographia Navalis, J. Charnock, 1794.

MENNES, Sir JOHN (1599-1671), admiral; recommended by Sir Alexander Brett for command 1626; served in the Narrow Seas; raised troop of carabineers, 1640; knighted, 1642; governor of North Wales for Charles I, 1644; commander of the king's navy, 1645; comptroller of the navy, 1661, 'though not fit for business,' according to Pepys; commander-in-chief in the Downs and admiral, 1662; published, with Dr. James Smith, 'Wits Recreations,' 1640, and 'Musarum Deliciae,' 1665.---Dictionary of National Biography: Index and Epitome. S. Lee, 1906.